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We estimate that access to the Kenyan mobile money system M-PESA increased per capita consumption levels and lifted 194,000 households, or 2% of Kenyan households, out of poverty.

That’s from Tavneet Suri and Billy Jack reporting in Science (ungated) based on observations over six years that when M-PESA mobile money spread into an area, poverty went down, particularly for female-headed households. It appears to have induced women to switch from agriculture to business occupations.

Hidden Brain tells the story of public health workers in Liberia who had to solve a murder, track down the killers before the police, and convince them to come into treatment to prevent an Ebola outbreak. (if you’re scrolling in iTunes, look for “54: Panic in the Streets'”)

And for lighter listening, the Slice of MIT podcast tracks down the students who a decade ago pulled the epic prank of stealing a 2-ton historic cannon from rival Caltech’s California campus. It showed up early one morning in the middle of MIT’s campus wearing a giant gold MIT class ring. (in iTunes scroll back to “Secrets of the Caltech Cannon Heist”)

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Chris Arnade is is a physics Ph.D. turned Wall Street trader, turned sociologist, documenting the post-industrial/forgotten towns in the U.S. He often tweets about the disconnect between economic statistics and things that can’t be measured, particularly a pervasive feeling of hopelessness in the left-behind towns.

Here he argues that Universal Basic Income makes sense to an economist’s point of view, but not to a sociologist’s, because it will socially divide the country up into givers and takers, sowing further resentments.

His argument is that academic researchers have a limited view of the world through data sets, but recommends spending more time in other parts of the country. (I’ve heard development economists often say RCTs were very helpful to molding their understanding of development because it got them to go to the places they were studying and talk to people there.)

We conduct a meta-analysis to gauge the average impact of transfers on temptation goods. Results show that on average cash transfers have a significant negative effect on total expenditures on temptation goods, equal to −0.18 standard deviations. This negative result is supported by data from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, for both conditional and unconditional cash transfer programs. A growing number of studies therefore indicate that concerns about the use of cash transfers for alcohol and tobacco are unfounded.

Some researchers think that some of China’s 30 million demographically “missing girls” (with the implication of abandonment/infanticide) are actually there, they’re just not officially registered in the census because of an implicit understanding between families and local authorities.

Tim Ogden makes the case for investing in microcredit. Even though on balance it’s not currently a poverty fix, it’s a working business model reaching many of the world’s poor. It’s time to experiment and see how to make it work better.

New Zealand to compensate organ donors (not to make money, but just paying for their lost wages so they at least break even). I believe the only market for kidneys is in Iran, and Tina Rosenberg did a nice examination of it here.

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This is usually a recent master’s or undergraduate student with strong quantitative skills who manages and analyzes data, helps manage my field projects, and generally helps me usher a project from fundraising and human subjects approval all the way to the academic paper and policy presentations. Data analysis is 75% of the job, and I will train and work with you closely. There are also some administrative and financial responsibilities, an there is sometimes short term field work involved around the world. Finally, the RA will also help me coordinate the new Peace & Recovery program at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and the new Crime and Violence initiative at the Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).

Most of the RAs who have worked with me in the past are interested in a PhD in economics, political science, or policy, and they usually go on to programs in the top five or ten departments. I’d like to think this is partly because of the experience and training, but it’s also because really terrific people apply. Please apply!

The ideal start date is March or April, but a later or earlier start date is feasible for the right candidate. After all, many people will be graduating from university in the spring and I am open to waiting for them to finish.

In terms of qualifications, strong statistical skills and STATA usage is a must, as is English fluency. Lots of other skills and experiences will be an advantage: previous research and field work experience; Spanish language skills; other computer programming or machine learning experience; great writing skills; and great managerial skills.

J-PAL and IPA manage all the hiring and so you must apply here. Please note: Writing me directly isn’t recommended because others manage the initial hiring process and I get involved after they have a short list.

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If you’re going to be traveling, or just want something to listen to, we’ve put together another IPA Great Holiday Travel Podcast Playlist of episodes we liked. It also includes a few brand new podcasts and a podcast discovery app that look promising.

Russia is following South Africa, Gambia and Burundi’s example and withdrawing from the International Criminal Court, and the Philippines is considering leaving as well. My (limited) understanding is that the U.S. hasn’t ratified it, so it’s not like we’re bound by it either.

The largest resistance we got to the idea about Vision Zero was from those political economists that have built their whole career on cost-benefit analysis. For them it is very difficult to buy into “zero.” Because in their economic models, you have costs and benefits, and although they might not say it explicitly, the idea is that there is an optimum number of fatalities. A price that you have to pay for transport.

Jim Yong Kim expressed a similar sentiment (see the link in our podcast post above) about what it was like at Partners In Health in the early days of arguing for HIV drugs for Africans.

The idea that we accept traffic deaths as inevitable is not a coincidence. We call them airplane “crashes” and see them as unacceptable. But in the early 1900’s automobile manufacturers introduced a marketing campaign to rebrand auto collisions as “accidents,” which makes them seem inevitable:

So a lot like the industrial safety people invented this cartoon character called Otto Know Better (ph), who was careless and getting injured, the pro-automobile people – manufacturers, auto clubs, auto dealers – invented caricatures of careless pedestrians because most of the people cars were killing then were pedestrians, not other people in cars.

Treated workers are less likely to leave during the program, and exhibit substantially higher productivity up to nine months after program completion. This leads to being assigned to more complex tasks and a greater likelihood of promotion. Treated workers are also more likely to enroll in workplace skill development and production incentive programs.

And the Golden Radiator Award nominees for best and worst development ads are up, you can vote for the finalists. Here was one of the good ones (also check out David Evans’ playlist of funny development commercials):

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I’m taking a wild guess there will be a spike in researchers looking at elections data for 2016. A reminder that you can get an advance look at the American National Elections Survey (ANES) questions, design and preregister your study, and get it pre-accepted to a number of political science journals all before the data comes out (and get a $2,000 prize).

Michael Lewis has a Vanity Fair article based on his new book about Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (above), the fathers of what would become behavioral economics. It’s about their friendship, and like Lewis’ other stories, about outsiders who end noticing something different and changing a whole field.

Another chapter of the U.N. response to South Sudan peacekeeping failures from a few weeks ago. Though a Kenyan general was dismissed, it was Chinese troops who abandoned their posts. The WSJ has a feature on how China is grappling with deaths of their peacekeeping soldiers there and the costs of their involvement. Complicating the relationship, some of their troops may have been killed by Chinese-manufactured weapons.

A bleg and a reminder. For the comments below – we’re looking for podcast episode recommendations for this year’s Great Holiday Travel Podcast Playlist (last years’ is here).

And if you’ve enjoyed these last 87 weeks of links, consider a donation to IPA. If you do it by the end of this weekend an anonymous donor will match it, effectively doubling your contribution. Bonus, if you tweet or email me that you did, we’ll select (randomly of course) some to mail a souvenir from the Ghana arm of last year’s Banerjee, et. al. Science paper.

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Through Nov 20, an anonymous donor is doubling donations to my employer, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), who uses rigorous research to find effective poverty solutions. (Some examples here, and pictured above: some of our Burkina Faso research staff about to ride out in the rainy season).

Some would like to digitize payments and schedules for Nairobi Matatu private buses. The technology exists, but one barrier is the operators, who benefit from the unpredictable system, conducting their own informal “surge pricing” off the books.

More than 800,000 drinking water filters were distributed in Kenya, supported by carbon credits sold for water that would supposedly not have to be boiled (you can buy some here). By coincidence a separate (IPA) RCT was going on in the same area, so they added on questions about the filter use, and found only 19% of people reported using them 2-3 years later. Summary in this press release, paper here.

Well, I think that a lot of the money – these big bills – is used to facilitate tax evasion and crime. We all use cash in our everyday life, but we don’t use hundred-dollar bills. We’re not using 500-euro notes. And yet these account for mountains of cash out there. I think they’re being used in tax evasion and by criminals of all types.

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Some weeks ago I began compiling job market advice for U of Chicago Harris PhD students, who go on a combination of economics, political science, professional school, and policy job markets. This page presents my first attempt to compile the essentials (and some non-essentials, as you will see). I welcome suggested additions. It si a work in progress.

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We believe that most of the bounces seen in surveys this year represent sampling noise that can be reduced or eliminated by adopting by better statistical methodology. We risk a repetition of 2012 where polling swings were largely statistical mirages. The convention and first debate bounces in 2012 were mostly the consequence of transitory variations in response rates. Fewer voters were changing their minds than were changing their inclination to respond to surveys.

Most telephone polls use independent samples, so the respondents in one week’s poll are different from those in another week’s. This makes it impossible to distinguish change in individual vote intentions from changes in sample composition from week to week. It is possible that five percent of the electorate switched from Clinton to Trump over the past week (decreasing Clinton’s lead by 10 points). But it’s also possible that nobody switched and apparent swings are due to differences in sample composition.

YouGov draws its samples from a large panel of respondents. In most of our polls, there is little overlap from one sample to another. However, sometimes the same respondents are recontacted to see whether their opinions have changed. For example, after the first presidential debate in September, we reinterviewed 2,132 people who had told us their vote intentions a month before. 95 percent of the September Clinton supporters said they intended to vote for her. None of them said they intended to vote for Donald Trump, but five percent said they were now undecided, would vote for a third party candidate, or would not vote. Of the Trump supporters, only 91 percent said they were still planning on voting for Trump. Five percent moved to undecided, one percent to Clinton, and the rest to third party candidates or not voting. The net effect was to increase Clinton’s lead by almost four points. That was real change, though significantly less that the ten point change to Clinton’s lead seen in some polls.

Other events, however, have not had any detectable impact on voting intentions. We did not see any shifts after the release of the Access Hollywood video, the second or third presidential debates, or the reopening of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s emails. When the same people were reinterviewed, almost all said they were supporting the same candidate they had told us they were supporting in prior interviews. The small number who did change their voting intentions shifted about evenly toward Clinton and Trump so the net real change was close to zero.

Although we didn’t find much vote switching, we did notice a different type of change: the willingness of Clinton and Trump supporters to participate in our polls varied by a significant amount depending upon what was happening at the time of the poll: when things are going badly for a candidate, their supporters tend to stop participating in polls. For example, after the release of the Access Hollywood video, Trump supporters were four percent less likely than Clinton supporters to participate in our poll. The same phenomenon occurred this weekend for Clinton supporters after the announcement of the FBI investigation: Clinton supporters responded at a three percent lower rate than Trump supporters (who could finally take a survey about a subject they liked).

The bolded italics are theirs.

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So when we moved to Cincinnati, we got the cheapest apartment we could find. It was the lowest apartment in the building, and we got hit by a summer storm. So what didn’t get destroyed by water got destroyed by mold. And I was, I think, seven and a half months pregnant, eight months pregnant at the time.

So I was calling every charity I could, thinking, I just need a chair. For – for whatever reason in my head, if I could just get a chair, then everything else would be fine. But I needed a place to sit. I, I got in touch with one charity who said, yeah, you can come and pick up a chair but we’re gonna need you to go to a resume-writing class. And I said, “For what?” and they said, “Well, because we need you to be looking for work and trying to better your situation; we don’t just give charity to just anybody. We need to make sure that you’re, you know, invested, you got some skin in the game.” And I said, “Okay, when is the resume-writing class?” And he gave me two different times. And I said, “Well, I have to be at work at both of those times.” And they said, “Well, if you want the charity you have to show up to the class.” And I was like, “If I come to the class I’ll get fired.” And this woman was telling me how I really needed to learn to write my resume so that I could find gainful employment, so that I could get the stupid chair that was probably worth five bucks.

That is what personal responsibility means to somebody on welfare. It means here are these stupid hoops that we’re gonna make you jump through and then we’re going to give you a solution that absolutely won’t work for you. It’s that kind of just over and over beating your head against these ridiculous regulations and these double-blinds that don’t make any sense. And the whole thing is set up specifically to humiliate you as much as possible because what we need poor people to do in America more than anything else in the world is know their place.

That from an amazing series busting myths about poverty in America from On The Media. The series goes into the many double binds the poor are often put in to get themselves out of poverty, because of societal myths about the causes of poverty. They also show how media portrayals of the poor can be driven by reporters searching for confirmatory stories to play to their audiences, typically focusing on the personal qualities of the individual, rather than circumstances they’ve been put in.

A good primer from Planet Money on what happened to Venezuela’s economy (Shorter version here, Even shorter version: dependent on oil, imported lots, and spent oil profits on social programs. When things went bad, they pegged the currency to dollar, which the government controlled access to which means scarce everything.)

Which brings us back to the bind that the U.N., which doesn’t have its own troops, is in. Over and over again, peacekeeping troops have been accused of neglecting or actively abusing the people they were sent to protect, but the U.N. is at the mercy of the countries who contribute the troops.

A story circulated this week about a medical study of male injectable birth control being stopped because men couldn’t handle side effects that sounded similar to those of female birth control. The “Men are wusses” story was more hasty science reporting. Vox pointed out if the reporters had dug a little deeper they would have found that most men wanted to continue the study but a safety monitoring panel stopped it because:

The 320 men who participated in the research reported a whopping 1,491 adverse events, and the researchers running the trial determined that 900 of these events were caused by the injectable contraceptive.

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I reprint Pam Jakiela’s advice in full. She was the first person I sat next to in grad school. Read it and you will see why she became, and remains, one of my favorite people. If you are interested, Pam’s research is here.

I’ve been working on a general job market advice page for Chicago students (and you) and all of the major advice you will find on the Internet skirt around the issue that Pam does not.

Academic Job Market Advice for PhD Students in Economics

The most important thing is your job market paper. All the time you spend agonizing over what you should wear, etc., has an opportunity cost. Focus on your research. Be excited about your research. This is why people will want to hire you (even when they don’t fully understand what your research is about).

You will inevitably encounter a number of situations where older professors will try to explain what is wrong with your research during your job talk. The people who interrupt you may or may not have any idea what they are talking about. It is important that you are firm in your replies, but you should make sure that you show senior faculty sufficient respect. Ideally, you should write each of them a personal thank you email after your talk. Their feedback is valuable, and rudeness in seminars is an important part of our field’s unique culture.

Do not, under any circumstances, do anything to suggest that you would ever consider compromising your career in any way to improve your quality of life or enable you to live with a spouse or partner. Remember: you are getting hired to be a researcher, you aren’t getting hired to be a human being! Ideally, even your advisers should not know whether or not you have any friends or family outside of the office, or even whether you have left the economics building since you started your PhD.

At smaller departments, it can be good to signal that you would be a good “fit” by discussing common interests – for example, economics. On some occasions, faculty members may bring their wives to the seminar dinner. It is ideal to show that you have common interests with them, as well – e.g. baking. However, you should make sure it is clear that economics takes precedence. For example, you might explain that you enjoy baking (who doesn’t?), but lately you have only been baking to relieve the stress of the job market.

Wear comfortable clothing. Campus visits are long days, and often involve a lot of walking. In many parts of the country, the weather will be almost unbearably cold during the flyout season. You may quickly come to regret the decision to wear high heels and stockings. Comfortable, dressy (but not overly feminine) boots and pants suits are ideal.

Special Advice for Male Students on the Job Market*

* NOTE: since I am not a man, I can never totally understand the particular experience of male students. Though I am not a male economist, I’ve talked with several male economists about their experiences. These suggestions are intended to be helpful and supportive.

Number #1 applies to you, too: research is paramount. Fortunately, if you are a male in the economics profession, it has probably never occurred to you to spend time thinking about clothes or really anything other than economics.

Number #2 is less likely to apply to you, but most male students do have some uncomfortable seminar experiences – remember, not all victims of mansplaining are female! Be firm in your replies. Anything short of throwing the laser pointer at someone is considered acceptable seminar behavior.

Unfortunately, Number #3 goes for you, too, male economists: it is fine to reveal the fact that you have a spouse and/or children as long as it is clear that they don’t take priority over your research. Inexplicably, it will somehow be understood that you will accept your best job offer regardless of the prospects for your spouse’s employment.

At smaller or more rural departments, it can be helpful to discuss common interests that you might share with senior faculty – for example, man caves, football statistics, and the latest in facial hair removal technology (admittedly, I am just speculating here).

Who are we kidding? Almost all dress shoes made for men are perfectly comfortable because… well, because that’s the way the world works. Nonetheless, I would seriously suggest that male economists think twice before deciding to wear heels and stockings during a flyout. We’re making progress as a society and a profession, but I’m not sure we’re there yet.

I asked, via Twitter, what other advice posts (and advice) my colleagues had to offer to job market candidates who are not in the white, male majority. The helpful pointers outweighed the range of… other reactions to my request. But while I got a LOT of advice, there were relatively few online write-ups of advice for academics. Hence my extra love for Pam’s post.

Even so, here are the online materials they suggested. Other suggestions welcome, by email or in the comments below.

For navigating dual careers as a couple, see the 2014 and 2016 newsletters from the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.

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A profile of a former Bucknell professor of African development economics who now leads an Ethiopian rebel army. He may be more qualified than most rebel leaders to comment on what he sees as the illusion of a decade of 11 percent annual economic growth in the country:

Nega insists that Ethiopia has “cooked the books,” and that its growth rate is largely attributable to huge infrastructure projects and Western development aid, with little contribution from the private sector. “The World Bank is throwing money at Ethiopia like there’s no tomorrow,” he told me. The actual growth rate, he insists, is closer to 5 to 6 percent — per capita income is still among the lowest in the world — and the weakness of the country’s institutions will mean that even this rate cannot be sustained.

And if you haven’t seen it, how that country stops bikers from being hit by car doors opening by teaching drivers the “Dutch reach,” (opening your car door by reaching across your body with the opposite arm, forcing you to turn and look behind you).

Two papers from a larger study on education in Kenya focusing on what keeps kids in school:

David Evans summarizes one which used qualitative methods to supplement the quant findings on why so many kids end up dropping out.

It’s typically the kid’s decision, not the parents’.

They point out that often it’s what happens before the study began which puts them on the dropout trajectory. The low level the kids were starting from means they can’t keep up with the class, which is demoralizing.

If you don’t live in one of these small towns, you can’t understand the hopelessness. The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called “Cost of Living.” Let’s say you’re a smart kid making $8 an hour at Walgreen’s and aspire to greater things. Fine, get ready to move yourself and your new baby into a 700-square-foot apartment for $1,200 a month, and to then pay double what you’re paying now for utilities, groceries, and babysitters. Unless, of course, you’re planning to move to one of “those” neighborhoods (hope you like being set on fire!).

In a city, you can plausibly aspire to start a band, or become an actor, or get a medical degree. You can actually have dreams. In a small town, there may be no venues for performing arts aside from country music bars and churches. There may only be two doctors in town — aspiring to that job means waiting for one of them to retire or die. You open the classifieds and all of the job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The “downtown” is just the corpses of mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart’s blast crater, the “suburbs” are trailer parks. There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic.

I’m telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive.

…”But Trump is objectively a piece of shit!” you say. “He insults people, he objectifies women, and cheats whenever possible! And he’s not an everyman; he’s a smarmy, arrogant billionaire!”

Wait, are you talking about Donald Trump, or this guy:

You’ve never rooted for somebody like that? Someone powerful who gives your enemies the insults they deserve? Somebody with big fun appetites who screws up just enough to make them relatable? Like Dr. House or Walter White? Or any of the several million renegade cop characters who can break all the rules because they get shit done? Who only get shit done because they don’t care about the rules?

If you ever drink bottled water, read this (yes it will make you feel bad about yourself)

An adjunct professor uses the occasion of his award speech to lambast the profession for exploiting adjuncts. As someone who studies sweatshop workers in Africa, I am hesitant to toss the word exploited around lightly, especially when it comes to some of the most highly educated people in the world. I am inclined to think and write more about this. It seems to me that simple supply and demand can get us pretty far towards an explanation, but not all the way. Is there any systematic economic analysis people have seen of the adjunct market and why the price/quantity relationship stands where it is?

Do electoral gatekeepers routinely discourage women from running for office? Through an audit experiment with 8,189 public officials, we examine whether (hypothetical) male and female students who express interest in political careers receive differential encouragement from electoral gatekeepers. We report three striking findings. First, emails sent by female students were more likely to receive a response than those sent by male students, especially when the official was male. Second, the responses women received were as likely to be long, thoughtful, and contain an offer of help as those to men. Third, there were no partisan differences in responsiveness to male or female senders. Examining senders with Hispanic last names bolsters the credibility of the results: Hispanic senders, especially men, were less likely to receive a quality response than non-Hispanic senders. These findings suggest that unequal encouragement by public officials is not a likely culprit of women’s under-representation in politics.

Joshua Kalla, Frances Rosenbluth, and Dawn Teele

If you’re a glass is half empty person, I guess you could say “so basically we still have a major gender imbalnce except now we don;t even have a good explanation and are back to square one”.

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There are few limits to how far Assange will go to try to control those around him. Those working at WikiLeaks – a radical transparency organisation based on the idea that all power must be accountable – were asked to sign a sweeping nondisclosure agreement covering all conversations, conduct, and material, with Assange having sole power over disclosure. The penalty for noncompliance was £12 million.

I refused to sign the document, which was sprung on me on what was supposed to be a short trip to a country house used by WikiLeaks. The others present – all of whom had signed without reading – then alternately pressured, cajoled, persuaded, charmed and pestered me to sign it, alone and in groups, until well past 4am.

Given how remote the house was, there was no prospect of leaving. I stayed the night, only to be woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign. It was two hours later before I could get Assange off the bed so I could (finally) get some pants on, and many hours more until I managed to leave the house without signing the ridiculous contract. An apologetic staffer present for the farce later admitted they’d been under orders to “psychologically pressure” me until I signed.

And once you have fallen foul of Assange — challenged him too openly, criticised him in public, not toed the line loyally enough — you are done. There is no such thing as honest disagreement, no such thing as a loyal opposition differing on a policy or political stance.
To criticise Assange is to be a careerist, to sell your soul for power or advantage, to be a spy or an informer. To save readers a Google search or two, he would tell you I was in WikiLeaks as an “intern” for a period of “weeks”, and during that time acted as a mole for The Guardian, stole documents, and had potential ties to MI5. Compared to some who’ve criticised Assange, I got off fairly lightly.

Those who have faced the greatest torments are, of course, the two women who accused Assange of sexual offences in Sweden in the summer of 2010. The details of what happened over those few days remain a matter for the Swedish justice system, not speculation, but having seen and heard Assange and those around him discuss the case, having read out the court documents, and having followed the extradition case in the UK all the way to the supreme court, I can say it is a real, complicated sexual assault and rape case. It is no CIA smear, and it relates to Assange’s role at WikiLeaks only in that his work there is how they met.

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I’m going to pitch Netflix a superhero show based loosely on David Evans, whose superpower is the ability to summarize large numbers of papers in a very readable way, this week it’s 34 papers on education (incentives, teacher training, technology and more).

Giving scientists money to bet on which studies will replicate predicts the ones that will 71 percent of the time. The Social Science Replication Project is recruiting new researchers to gamble on replications of 21 experimental studies published in Nature and Science (deadline Oct 31).

Bentzen, Kaarsen, & Wingender paper, Irrigation and Autocracy:

“We find that countries whose agriculture depended on irrigation are about six points less democratic on the 21-point polity2 scale than countries where agriculture has been rainfed. We find qualitatively similar results across regions within countries. We argue that the effect has historical origins: irrigation allowed landed elites in arid areas to monopolize water and arable land. This made elites more powerful and better able to oppose democratization. Consistent with this conjecture, we show that irrigation dependence predicts land inequality both at the country level, and in premodern societies surveyed by ethnographers.”

Bloomberg has a piece about the promise and difficulties of behavioral economics for designing financial products that promote savings for people in the cash economy. It’s a frank look at some of the challenges of a pilot from Jonathan Zinman of Dartmouth with Dean Karlan nudging Bronx check cashing customers to open savings accounts.

Consider the difference between two ZIP codes with similar incomes in Texas. In Houston’s ZIP code 77072, with a relatively large Asian population, the Princeton Review course was offered for $7,200. While in Dallas’ ZIP code 75203, with almost no Asians, the course was offered for $6,600. And in heavily Asian, low-income Queens ZIP code 11355, the course was offered for $8,400.

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My rapist was not Mr. Z but a member of his innermost circle — his “money collector.” I hardly knew my rapist; I did not even know his name. He was the tall, wiry guy I had eaten dinner with many times, let into the house, and would greet on the street. Before that night, I had written four unremarkable sentences about him in my field notes. Then one evening Mr. Z invited me to have dinner with him and his friends — a fieldwork opportunity I always accepted. Because he had other plans later, he asked the money collector to take me home, where he then raped me. Mr. Z was as much of a gatekeeper in my fieldwork as he was in my rape: The rapist was Mr. Z’s friend and subordinate, and it happened under his roof and watch that night. What happened to me was an ordinary acquaintance rape of extraordinary circumstances.

In the immediate days that followed, it is not an exaggeration to say that I feared for my life. With one unforeseen event, a situation that had felt fairly safe rapidly escalated into dangerous. For more reasons than one, I did not involve the police: In a country with an astonishingly high rate of rape and a notoriously corrupt police force, I did not believe the police (even with the involvement of the U.S. embassy) would protect me. Nor would the criminal-justice system deliver me meaningful justice.

Instead I turned to Mr. Z, who governed this world. I wanted him to know what the money collector had done, and I needed to inoculate any threat I presented, as I was no longer his houseguest but the raped American researcher. Although he expressed some sympathy, his allegiances were with his money collector. We tacitly agreed that I wouldn’t pursue charges and he wouldn’t harm me.

Having completed a significant amount of research, I could have abruptly ended my fieldwork. Instead, I chose to take a leave and later returned to finish what I had started. I refused to allow my rapist to take my fieldwork after already taking my body.

In The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart, Ruth Behar quotes Clifford Geertz: “You don’t exactly penetrate another culture, as the masculinist image would have it. You put yourself in its way and it bodies forth and enmeshes you.” This is my story about rape, but it is more than that, too.

When ethnographers can access and immerse themselves in worlds unknown, such as illicit ones, their work is valued and rewarded. Within the academic version of celebrity, the risk-taking, intrepid, normatively white and male ethnographer is a star. The price that many ethnographers pay in pursuing their fieldwork is not always recognized, and rape carries a particular stigma.

I agree the risks are particularly high for women, because of rape, but it’s worth saying that youth, inexperience, and peer pressure also drive broader set of field work risks, risks that few of us as graduate students were prepared for.

I have not only felt these myself (when, as PhD students pursuing their dissertation, my wife and I camped in displacement camps with active rebels around) but even more acutely when I hire young research assistants and surveyors. The risk their home is invaded by criminals (happened, fortunately non-violently); the risk that someone breaks an ankle on slippery motorbike paths through the jungle (also happened); a mugging gone awry (also happened, fortunately resulting only in minor injury). Nothing more serious has happened on my projects so far. Partly this is because precautions I insist on. Partly because I’ve pulled out of working in some countries for reasons like these. But partly it’s also luck.

It’s surprising how little we talk about these risks, even when those of us who work in dangerous places gather for drinks. People exchange advice, especially about health risks—where to go for emergency malaria treatment, warnings not to take the motorbike taxis, and so forth. But my hunch is that machoism keeps us from talking about the security concerns, rape included.

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I'm a Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. I use field work and statistics to study poverty, political engagement, the causes and consequences of violence, and policy in developing countries. [Read more]